One approach towards the treatment of insulin-dependent diabetes is to supplement the patients' defective Islets of Langerhans with functionally active islets. Recently, techniques have been devised which enable the isolation and culturing of individual Islets of Langerhans. Such isolated islets are capable of reversing diabetes in genetically predisposed or chemically induced diabetic animals. The success of such a treatment modality is dependent on the isolation of large numbers of functional islets from a limited number of donors followed by transplantation into suitable recipients. This proposed research will concentrate on improving the isolation techniques for islets and short-term and long-term storage of those islets. We will continue our studies into methods of freezing both isolated islets and Beta cells obtained from rodents and extend these studies to include human islets. If long-term banking of such cells and tissues are feasible, then the establishment of a tissue bank of isolated islets would allow sufficient time for immunological cross-matching and should dramatically increase the probability of obtaining long-term functional islet transplants.